Salesforce.com appears to be the buyer who paid $2.6 million in late June 2011 for social.com, this year’s top selling domain to date, that has been publicly reported.
The buyer in the social.com sale, which was co-brokered by Marksmen’s Cyntia King and Moniker.com’s John Mauriello, was never revealed. The purchase set off speculation about the new owner ranging from Twitter to Living Social and even Salesforce.com.
However, up until now there hasn’t been any clear idea as to the buyer.
The primary contact for the domain is Alica Del Valle who is the Trademark Counsel at Salesforce.com. It didn’t take very much research at all to figure it out. It started with a few Google searches and I was able to connect the dots after using Network Solutions’ “User ID recovery tool” even though the domain was behind its not-so-private registration services.
I went to the Network Solutions “Forgot Your Login?” page and entered the domain social.com, then clicked the button: Retrieve Your User ID. The resulting page showed Alica Del Valle as the primary contact, as shown here.
No big news, as others had already done this before but just never connected the name “Alica Del Valle” to Salesforce.com.
Alica Del Valle according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, is not only the attorney of record for Salesforce.com (scroll to bottom of filing), but has been the Trademark Counsel at Salesforce.com since July 2011 according to Alica’s own LinkedIn page.
Earlier in the week I had guessed Salesforce.com was the buyer of Social.com after discovering Salesforce was the buyer of Do.com, a “Coming Soon” site for a yet-to-be launched business productivity app. The company had brokered the domain Do.com through Marksmen. Do.com was also hidden behind Whois privacy at Network Solutions using the very same moniker “ADV”. The privacy was finally removed two days after my Do.com story ran, officially revealing salesforce.com as the owner.
Last week at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff welcomed more than 30,000 attendees to the Social Enterprise.
At the time of this story being published, the Whois information for social.com remains regsistered to “ADV” behind Network Solutions’ private registration services.
The web address still does not resolve to a web page, however the buyer no longer appears to be a mystery.
Updated Nov. 30: Marc Benioff confirmed publicly at Salesforce.com’s Cloudforce New York that he did buy social.com.
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Talking about this story: TechCrunch, Louis Gray, Domain Name Wire, BillHartzer.com and Elliot’s Blog (blog)
8 replies on “Salesforce.com is the mystery buyer of $2.6 million Social.com [UPDATED]”
[…] to Fusible.com, Salesforce was also the $2.6 million buyer of Social.com, which was listed at the same Moniker […]
So funny. All these tweets and retweets, on a story that just ‘may not be’, no, isn’t quite true.
It would be funny that’s for sure, if it wasn’t Salesforce.com. But it would be very interesting considering Alica is the trademark counsel for Salesforce.com and is still listed as the primary contact. If you have more info, feel free to share.
[…] A hat tip goes out to fusible for mentioning this in a recent post. […]
[…] to Fusible.com, Salesforce was also the $2.6 million buyer of Social.com, which was listed at the same Moniker […]
[…] $2.6 million, putting its spending for domain names in the past year over $4 million. According to Fusible, the domain name is registered to Alica Del Valle, Salesforce.com’s trademark attorney. […]
[…] Acquired by Salesforce.com. […]
[…] Number five in the Top 10 stories of 2011 here on Fusible, with nearly two hundred tweets, was revealing Salesforce.com as the buyer of social.com in September. […]